Between Chapel Hill and Timbuktuhttp://sshields.wordpress.com
Thu, 22 May 2008 16:26:08 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngBetween Chapel Hill and Timbuktuhttp://sshields.wordpress.com
Teaching Turkey: A New Adventurehttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/teaching-turkey-a-new-adventure/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/teaching-turkey-a-new-adventure/#commentsTue, 13 May 2008 13:10:22 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/?p=337]]>We leave this morning to begin a new adventure. Our ten UNC students should be meeting us in Istanbul over the next few days for a summer field seminar, Turkey: Layers of Identity. I have met these students only briefly, so, in addition to the excited anxiety that comes at the beginning of each new course I greet, I also get to contemplate seven weeks abroad in daily contact with nine strangers (and two friends). My hope is that, by the end of our stay, we will have cohered into a group of learners and teachers–and that we will all have learned an enormous amount about travel, about working together, and about the fascinating and complex society, polity, and culture of today’s Turkey.

This is a Burch field seminar, an innovative combination of study abroad and research sponsored by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Instead of the students attending various courses or going on a guided tour, the program encourages students to work with faculty on a topic central to the professor’s research. My current research is on the creation of collective identities in the Middle East. Although I’m concentrating on the 1920s and 1930s, our summer project both draws on that research and, I hope, will contribute some insights to my work. At the same time, it offers students an opportunity to focus on a particular topic while exploring a new world area. In theory, the Burch seminar program embodies the best of the “research university”–a place where teaching enriches research and research informs teaching.

William and I leave in a few minutes to get to Istanbul a few days before the students arrive, a little time to make sure we can find their apartments and walk through their neighborhood. I’m carrying the books I will need to write lectures, but mostly, I think, Istanbul will be their text. It is a remarkable city, and I can’t wait to share it with these students. My first visit was more than 25 years ago, and it hardly seems foreign. It will be fascinating to watch these students experience it for the first time. Another adventure, and I approach this one with anticipation, anxiety, curiosity– and excitement.

]]>http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/teaching-turkey-a-new-adventure/feed/1sshieldsBetween Chapel Hill and Timbuktuhttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/between-chapel-hill-and-timbuktu/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/between-chapel-hill-and-timbuktu/#commentsSun, 13 Jan 2008 21:33:28 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/between-chapel-hill-and-timbuktu/]]>We didn’t reach Timbuktu, which I suppose is yet another echo of those nineteenth-century travelers I mentioned at the beginning of our journey. We were gone for six months, July in Morocco with Katie and Ian, then five months in Aleppo, then ten days in Mali. The last few weeks my attention has been a bit divided, trying to finish the book and at the same time put together a course syllabus and first lecture for my TA’s to present while I was still in Mali. Most interestingly, though, I’ve been working on a grant proposal that crosses whatever boundary might exist between my life and my work. The proposal, to create a seminar exploring diversity among Muslim societies and efforts to impose uniformity, seemed to write itself as I traveled. The move from Syria to Mali was startling. Both have huge Muslim majorities, but that seemed to indicate little about economy, social interaction, religious monuments, ritual practice, or even people’s dress. (I asked Abdulaye about the hogs I saw in a field. Who eats them? Everyone, he responded.)

I write this last blog on the plane heading back to the US (Joy, currently living in our house, may be a bit surprised…) thinking about the huge spaces we have traveled, the remarkable things we have seen, and the many, many people we have met between Chapel Hill and Timbuktu. In the end, of course, travels are not really about the destinations but about the journeys themselves, and not actually seeing Timbuktu–disappointing though it is–seems a fitting beginning to a sequel.

Thanks to all of you for your comments and your continuing interest; to new friends across the region for their support, laughter, and assistance; to Katie and Ian for coming along on parts of the journey and encouraging their mother’s wanderlust; and, of course, to William, for all the photographs, love, enthusiasm, humor, and spirit of adventure. One could not hope for better traveling companions.

Reading others’ travel writing could become a substitute for one’s own journeys. I hope, instead, that this one has encouraged you to actually step out. Enjoy the journey.

]]>http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/between-chapel-hill-and-timbuktu/feed/0sshieldsBack to Bamakohttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/back-to-bamako/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/back-to-bamako/#commentsFri, 11 Jan 2008 18:44:59 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/back-to-bamako/]]>Abdulaye, the terrific driver who had taken us to Severe, just happened to be in Mopti, returning in an empty car to Bamako, so we rode along. Four hours back to Segou, through the same remarkable countryside. We stopped there for lunch, wending our way through the weekly bazaar to a riverside restaurant. The sounds and smells were quite remarkable, but all I can do here is the photos.

Segou’s waterfront was fascinating to watch. People and products moved from the shore to the small craft and back, people were fishing out in the river, bright colors, lots of activity.

At the weekly market, people were too busy to really notice us, a marked difference from most of our stops. When we stopped for gas at one of the “gas stations” along the road, we drew the usual crowd of curious children and merchants selling textiles and jewelry. There are gas stations as I’m used to them in Mali, places with pumps and hoses and the like. There are also tables with liter bottles full of gasoline to serve drivers between the widely-scattered larger establishments.

We arrived back in Bamako around 5, checked into the hotel that had wireless access a week earlier to try to contact various travel agents and family and airline companies to make some plans. Nothing seemed to work. Their internet connection was down. When we called, the Royal Air Maroc ticket agency said we need to call either the Bamako or New York office. We had four different phone numbers for the airline’s Bamako office, none of them correct. The New York office insisted we had to contact our ticketing agent. When we tried that, we found they had sold the business, kept the tickets already written, and were only available by email. We decided we couldn’t do it the “right way,” so instead we showered, repacked, ate dinner, tried to sleep a few hours, and went to the airport in hopes of flying standby.

Airport scene was pretty wild, an overbooked Air France flight with everyone trying to make it to Paris. Once they cleared out, we convinced a sympathetic ticket agent that we really needed to leave and really couldn’t contact anyone to change our ticket. I’d just about given up when they handed us boarding passes with a warning that we wouldn’t find a seat from Casa Blanca to JFK.

We decided to take our chances, and arrived in Casa Blanca after a sleepless night. There we found another terrific Royal Air Maroc agent who put us on the waiting list. Before we had a chance to contact anyone to let them know we were headed home, we had boarded the flight for JFK.

]]>http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/back-to-bamako/feed/1sshieldssegoumarket3.jpgsegoumarket21.jpgsegoumarket4.jpgsegouriver.jpggasstation.jpgNo Longer Throwing Caution to the Windshttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/no-longer-throwing-caution-to-the-winds/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/no-longer-throwing-caution-to-the-winds/#commentsThu, 10 Jan 2008 18:41:41 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/no-longer-throwing-caution-to-the-winds/]]>When William’s fever reappeared in Segou, we had decided to skip camping in the Dogon areas and went to Mac’s Refuge instead. It was just what we needed, a couple days of Mac’s good food and friendly company, a couple of days to do nothing. We met some very interesting people over meals there, Peace Corps volunteers, a woman cycling across Africa and into Asia (five months, she says), a man working on Mali business development for the EU, and Mac himself, who grew up in Dogon country the child of missionaries, and returned there a missionary himself. Now he runs a bed and breakfast for people needing the warmth (and American breakfasts) he offers.

Mac called in a Malian doctor, the tallest doctor I think I’ve ever seen. After listening to his lungs, the doctor told William to rest and prescribed antibiotics and numerous other things. (House call: $25) By the second day, William was feeling better. On the third day we decided to continue north to Mopti, the jumping-off point for tourists heading into Dogon areas and Timbuktu.

Walking into the terrace restaurant at the Ya Pas De Problem hotel felt like entering Star Wars’ Mos Eisley space port, except this time everyone in the place was human and each had only one of two goals: either to get to the Festival in the Desert in Timbuktu, or to sell their services to those who wanted to go. These were people who hadn’t made plans yet to hook up with an organized tour. They had come to Mali, gotten as far as Mopti, and then mixed with the variety of guides and drivers and captains who were looking for clients at the busiest spot in town. Those who wanted to be hired were dressed in a remarkable array of clothing and headgear. One captain with a long silk scarf that wound around his neck and almost down to his knees wanted to sell us a trip on a small pinasse, a river boat. It would take three days going up the Niger to Timbuktu, he promised, seeing the most interesting villages along the way. Seemed too good to pass up. But we had a reservation in Timbuktu in two days. So we were in there with the rest, trying to find someone with empty seats in a 4×4 headed to Timbuktu.

We had come up with a couple of good leads, and then I got a fever. The next morning, the one before we were supposed to leave for Timbuktu, we decided to turn back. We couldn’t imagine the 12 hour bumpy ride to Timbuktu, then another 40 km of desert to get to the festival, followed by sand and cold and all-night music. Sad to say, we felt our age and acted it. So it was back to Mac’s, with my fever and William’s cough, to wait for a ride back to Bamako.

The photo of the mosque at Djenne that I have been showing my class seems to have no context, just a strange and spectacular building set off by itself.

It isn’t set off by itself. It is in the center of an unpaved dirt courtyard, surrounded by children playing, goats sleeping, touts offering guiding services, stalls selling assorted goods, and two foosball tables used by young men.

It is, without doubt, an imposing structure, built of mud bricks, with poles sticking out at regular intervals to allow people to scale the walls to remud the structure. It was rebuilt in 1906. There was little the French bequeathed their former colony in Mali (baguettes, French language, and remarkably little infrastructure), but, like in Morocco, here too they began refusing non-Muslims entry into mosques. So I was unable to see what the structure looks like inside.

The mosque, a World Heritage site, seems to be what brings people to Djenne. The town lies on the other side of the Bani river, and the crossing requires the use of a four-vehicle car ferry. Our drive up from Segou passed through many more small villages, an 18-wheeler broken down on the side of the road, a collection of overloaded minibuses, motorcycles, goats, cattle, and horses. After passing through miles and miles of wheat fields, then watermelon fields, then mud-brick-making fields, we turned off the main road and encountered flooded rice fields before crossing the river into Djenne.

After seeing the mosque, we set off in search of the mud cloth William had been commissioned to find. There is one famous mud cloth maker, a matriarch who looks to be in her 60s. Her son explained the various motifs, the groups who used them, and the methods still being employed to make the cloth. It is quite impressive stuff. We were invited up onto the balcony to see the view of the city from there, and found mud, cloth, and plant material for dyes awaiting use.

They tell me Mali is the fourth poorest country in the world, though I don’t know how that is measured, and Djenne is the poorest town I’ve ever been in. Along the route today, we passed two villages where signs announced proudly that electricity had come in 2006. . In side the town, There are no paved streets, houses are small, and the sewer system is a series of open trenches in the middle of the streets. Nonetheless, children walk around barefoot. Apparently, the street sewer is a result of well-meaning development projects. Water had been brought into town only for cooking and drinking, while washing and other tasks were done on the riverside. Those who arranged to pipe water into town didn’t consider the greater output, and there was no planning for what to do with the waste. See “How Not to Parachute More Cats.”

The road from Bamako to Segou takes almost four hours. Almost as soon as we left Bamako’s sprawl, we were in a small village celebrating market day–along the main highway. Our driver, Abdullah, slowed down as he wove through people, stalls, animals, and large vans unloading merchandise.

Most of the road, though, is quite rural, miles and miles of scrub interrupted by roadside villages with a few houses and a mosque. We started off listening to a taped sermon by one of Mali’s most famous imams–in Bambara language, with intermittent Qur’anic quotes in Arabic. When that ended, I requested music, and Abdullah put on a Tracy Chapman cassette. By midway, we were listening to music from Mali.

Small village mosque, larger village mosque

People sat along the roadside, apparently watching each other and the varied conveyances cars going by. We passed a broken down bus, a van, and a car stuck on the side of the road. Small herds of small cattle grazed in the scrub, while groups of fewer than six goats reserved the space closer to the road. (Abdullah honked at them to convince them to stay on their own side.) He reassured me that there really was someone tending them.

Segou seems more prosperous and less frenetic than Bamako. It is a river town, and I was impressed with the amount of activity along the Niger’s banks here. We just missed taking a huge canoe (pinasse) across–still hope to get on the water at some point during our trip.

In the continuing series, Che here is a revolutionary cola.

]]>http://sshields.wordpress.com/2008/01/01/on-the-road-to-segou/feed/1sshieldsroadmarket.jpgroadsidemarket.jpgsmallmosque.jpgbigmosque.jpgcattle.jpgnigerbanks.jpgche1.jpgSecond Impressionshttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/second-impressions/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/second-impressions/#commentsMon, 31 Dec 2007 10:40:48 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/second-impressions/]]>Bamako is different than anywhere I have been. The smells, the sounds, the clothing all seem quite unfamiliar. Only the old man kneeling on his prayer rug on the main road offered a sense of familiarity.

We took a taxi to the national museum this afternoon. The textile collection is fabulous, beginning with fabrics printed on jacquard weaves introduced through Syria. Cotton, combination, wool–Mali’s textiles are remarkably varied in fibers, patterns, weaves, colors, and uses. The other big exhibit in the national museum right now is on ritual objects. Many are masks, with accompanying descriptions of the kinds of initiation and worship in which they are used. I was particularly struck by one placard explaining that, when Islam was introduced, local rituals were adapted to the new faith. The curator seemed not to understand the irony when, in the same hall, s/he explained that Islam forbids the representation of human figures. Human figures are present on almost all of the amazing carved masks and statues in the exhibit.

The hall portraying Mali’s long history included some pottery and glass shards that had originated in Egypt and Spain. I was impressed with the efforts to include not only all of the various groups present today in Mali, but also the museum’s efforts to place the country within its broader context. That was particularly evident in the collection of photographs, whose creators were from all over the African continent.

The ride back was as remarkable as the museum itself. In Turkey and Syria, the large bazaars are near, in, or attached to large monumental structures. Here, the market seems to be rows and rows of temporary stalls, lean-tos, three sided single-story structures made of impermanent materials. Those with carts or tables or baskets seemed even more transient. Walking along the road this evening, driving in the taxi this afternoon, I was struck by how different Mali is from Syria, or even Morocco.

People wear remarkable clothing, varied in color and in style. At the same time, the cars seem all of one kind–very old, quite run-down, poorly maintained, all giving a sense that you may be the last passenger ever to travel within. People are all along the streets, walking, sitting, talking, getting into minibuses that share the vintage of the cars. An open ditch filled with black water and garbage ran along the sidewalk we walked this evening–even opposite an impressive looking structure with a sign reading “National Institute for Research in Public Health.” This is Mali’s biggest city, and her capital, but we have seen only one building that has more than one story. There are some real restaurants, but even more stands that cook food for those passing by. I have a strange sense that the city is temporary; in the morning, the markets and the people may have moved on.

Our plane landed in Mali’s capital Bamako half an hour late, around 3:00 am (with the two hour time difference, it was almost the same time we would usually be awakening in Aleppo). We had no Malian currency, neither sim nor phone card, immediately reawakening that traveler sense of needing everything at once. So we were completely thrilled to see a man holding a sign with our names on it. He put our two small suitcases into the trunk of a very decrepit 1960s vehicle that made me realize how well-maintained that car had been, the one I was so dubious about six months ago in Morocco. The driver asked whether we had ever been to Africa before. Morocco doesn’t count, he said. That’s Arab Africa. This is black Africa. No, we haven’t. First time. Welcome!

We drove along fairly empty streets to the hotel, where a man carried our suitcases down the street and into a wonderful hotel room, showed us how to use the mosquito netting and left us to sleep. When William awoke this morning with a fever and a terrible cough, we decided we wouldn’t stray too far today.

Even staying on the hotel grounds, though, it’s pretty clear we’re not in Syria anymore. It is 90 degrees and sunny here. We’re back to T shirts and sandals. The trees look like enormous versions of our own greenhouse plants, or the sort of displays one sees in the more exotic sections of a bit city zoo. I kept a cute 3 foot tall potted rubber plant in my college dorm room. The one shading the breakfast area in the hotel courtyard here must have a diameter of 8 feet. We have two ficuses (fici?) in our dining room in NC, one probably 8 feet tall, the other a climber whose size seems to astonish newcomers. Here they are gigantic! It sort of makes this place feel like home, the same trees in the dining room, but the scale is a bit different.

When I walked to the main street to get some phone minutes and buy a couple of sandwiches, I realized that this road seemed to come straight out of all those novels about Africa I’d read over the past decade or so. Bought a couple of very undercooked hamburgers from the place across the street, a restaurant with two cooks, one Indian and the other African, each for his own special cuisine. No hamburger cooks, alas.

First impressions always seem fascinating to me, though I often realize I was wrong. Today I am struck with how colorful this small section of Bamako is. No women wearing black veils over black coats, no white stone buildings. (And women are everywhere, working as shopkeepers, receptionists, and cleaners, covering their heads but not their shoulders or arms.) Men and women alike wear lots of colors, a strikingly colorful landscape, even if we hadn’t just been coming from color-deprived Aleppo. (Note, though, that, while public spaces in Aleppo seem to be uniform shades of stone and black, with intermittent red checked scarves covering men’s heads, the private spaces are incredibly ornate, and Syrian textiles are wonderfully complex.)

We will function in French here. William suggested Arabic to the driver last night, and what he spoke reminded me much more of what we had heard in Morocco than anything I’d learned in classes in the US or on the streets in Syria. It seems people go back and forth between French and the other local languages. French is Mali’s common language here, among the great diversity of languages that this country’s varied groups speak. (We have met few English-speakers, even among people who serve tourists.)

Everyone had been hoping for rain. It finally came, quite late, and in the middle of the olive harvest. It rained so hard in northern Syria that the harvest had to be interrupted for a couple of weeks. Now, our friend Nabeg is hiring dozens of workers each day to get the ripe olives off the trees. A man from “the villages” brings a group of young workers, mostly young women, but also teenage boys. One 30-something woman joked that she was still in her 20s, presumably to explain her presence. They get paid about $1 for an 8 hour day.

The olives taste terrible right off the tree–as Katie the curious found out. They have to be soaked in salt water for three weeks, the ripe black ones straight off, and the unripe green ones after being slit in many places.But most of the olives from the area around Idlib are pressed into olive oil. Each of these bags will yield roughly one tin, weighing 17 kilos when full of oil.

The machinery was imported from Turkey. Olive tree owners bring the bags to the press, and each is charged around $3 for each bag pressed. The press’ profit comes from selling the residue, from which more oil is chemically extracted and used for making soap.

The olive oil is terrific, and seems to be the oil most commonly used for cooking here. Sad we couldn’t figure out how to get some home.

We’re on the road again, in Beirut at the moment, awaiting our flight to Bamako, Mali.

]]>http://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/olive-oil/feed/0sshieldsolive6.jpgolive31.jpgolive4.jpgolive2.jpgolive5.jpgolive1.jpgolive8.jpgolive7.jpgChristmashttp://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/christmas/
http://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/christmas/#commentsWed, 26 Dec 2007 08:10:16 +0000http://sshields.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/christmas/]]>Out walking with Katie in Aleppo’s old Christian quarter Saturday evening, we followed the Christmas carols to the Greek Catholic Church. A group of high school girls wearing Santa hats was practicing for a performance, singing carols in Latin. The acoustics in the small, square church are terrific. Someone was trying to make a PowerPoint presentation work behind them–tech frustration seems one of those universals.

We wanted to buy a tree, and people reassured us it was easy, just go to Sulaymaniye’s main street and look left. But all the trees there were paper or plastic! When we asked, we found it is forbidden to cut trees for holiday celebrations. All of our advisers simply assumed that we were looking for the “regular” kind. In the end, William brought home a terrific tree, about two feet tall, with small lights at the tips of each pretend plastic branch; the lights change colors and flash in interesting combinations, apparently randomly. The box says the tree is made in the United Arab Emirates.

Aziziya has extensive decorations, lights, Papa Noel, sleighs and reindeer. I haven’t found a nativity scene. The radio has been playing familiar Christmas tunes, lyrics in Arabic.

It’s been nice having Katie around, and we miss Ian. And friends. And we wish you all a wonderful 2008!